Folkloric Metamodernism: Orality, Textuality, and the 21st-Century Folktale in Ini Ubong Ite’s Ekọñ Ñke: Our Stories

The contemporary moment of African literature is marked by a decolonial resurgence that seeks to transcribe the living breath of oral traditions into textual form without ossifying their vitality. This paper examines how Ini Ubong Ite’s Ekọñ Ñke: Our Stories meets this challenge by advancing a distinct literary mode termed folkloric metamodernism. Moving beyond the critical impasse between nostalgic nativism and postmodern pastiche that often characterizes studies of African orality, Ubong Ite’s curation of Ibibio tales employs a dynamic oscillation between sincerity and irony, the communal and the individual, the ancestral and the contemporary, to reactivate folklore for twenty-first-century critique. Through close readings of four stories, this analysis delineates three core strategies of this mode: formal oscillationin linguistic code-switching, affective hybridityin narrative voice, and temporal collapsein plot structure. The paper traces a progressive arc in Ubong Ite’s project, demonstrating how folkloric metamodernism evolves from a tool for negotiating ethical dilemmas to a framework for epistemological inquiry, ontological reimagining, and ultimately, radical political allegory. Ultimately, this study contends that Ubong Ite’s work constitutes a significant decolonial aesthetic. By making Ibibio oral performance the structural principle of the text itself, Ekọñ Ñke: Our Stories challenges the colonial hierarchy of text over orality and offers a model of ancestral futurity, where indigenous knowledge serves not as a relic of the past but as a blueprint for building viable futures. This analysis thus expands the geographic and cultural scope of metamodern theory while contributing a new critical framework for understanding contemporary African literature’s negotiation of tradition and modernity.